Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Visions of Numberland - Alex Bellos and Edmund Harriss **

When someone flogs a concept to death financially it is sometimes described as 'milking it for all it's worth'. This isn't something I've ever come across in popular science before, but by producing a mathematical adult colouring book on his recurring (see what I did then?) 'numberland' theme, Alex Bellos has managed it.I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of adult colouring books. It adds a whole new texture to 'dumbing down' that they are considered (and priced as) books at all. And I'm afraid this has not made me a convert.I don't deny that it's possible for maths to be used as a brilliant starting point for art. No one who appreciates mathematics can fail to be impressed by Escher's work, for example. And to give Bellos his due, we do get a handful of lines of description for each mathematical structure that we are offered to colour in. Even so, and despite being provided with 60 patterns to colour (and '10 more that YOU create!' - oh, still my beating heart), it does seem a bit of a rip off to price this like a book that actually took someone time to write - it costs nearly £10.Can I find something good to say? The shapes by mathematical artist Edmund Harriss are delightfully constructed, especially when they move away from the simply geometric with something like the Hopf vibration. And just occasionally Bellos does give us a bit more detail, for example in the Thue-Morse sequence where we get almost half a page of text. But there could have been so much more.As you might have gathered, this very much isn't for me.Paperback:

Review by Brian Clegg

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Labels

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ever since The War of the Worlds, the post-apocalyptic disaster novel has been a firm fixture in the Science Fiction universe. What's more, such books are often among the few SF titles that are shown any interest by the literati, probably because many future disaster novels feature very little science. With a few exceptions, though (I'm thinking, for instance, The Chrysalids) they can make for pretty miserable reading unless you enjoy a diet of page after page of literary agonising.

The Feed is a real mixture. Large chunks of it are exactly that - page after page of self-examining misery with an occasional bit of action thrown in. But, there are parts where the writing really comes alive and shows its quality. This happens when we get the references back to pre-disaster, when we discover the Feed, which takes The Circle's premise to a whole new level with a mega-connected society where all human interaction is through directly-wired connections… until the whole thing fails …

Science fiction has a long tradition of 'military in space' themes - and usually these books are uninspiring at best and verging on fascist at worst. From a serious SF viewpoint, it seemed that Joe Haldeman's magnificent The Forever War made the likes of Starship Troopers a mocked thing of the past, but sadly Hollywood seems to have rebooted the concept and we now see a lot of military SF on the shelves.

The bad news is that The Bastard Legion could not be classified as anything else - but the good news is that, just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer subverted the vampire genre, The Bastard Legion has so many twists on a straightforward 'marines in space' title that it does a brilliant job of subversion too.

The basic scenario is instantly different. Miska is heading up a mercenary legion, except they're all hardened criminals on a stolen prison ship, taking part because she has stolen the ship and fitted them all with explosive collars. Oh, and helping her train her &…

There's much to enjoy in Richard Carter's pean to the frugal yet visceral delights of being one with England's Pennine moorland. If this were all there were to the book it would have made a good nature read, but Carter cleverly weaves in science at every opportunity, whether it's inspired by direct observations of birds and animals and plants - I confess I was ignorant of the peregrine falcon's 200 mile per hour dive - or spinning off from a trig point onto the geometric methods of surveying through history all the way up to GPS.

Carter is something of an expert on Darwin, and inevitably the great man comes into the story many times - yet his appearance never seems forced. It's hard to spend your time in a natural environment like this and not have Darwin repeatedly brought to mind.

I confess to a distinct love of these moors. Having spent my first 11 years in and around Littleborough, just the other side of Blackstone Edge from Carter's moor, the moorland…

Menu

About our editor

Author of Science for Life,The Quantum Age, Final Frontier, Dice World, Gravity, The Universe Inside You, Build Your Own Time Machine, Inflight Science, A Brief History of Infinity, The God Effect and more, Brian spends most of his time these days writing popular science books and giving talks.